What are conveyors?
Conveyors are the mechanical system that moves materials one location to another. The transport systems allow fast and efficient transport for a wide variety of materials, which makes them very popular in the materials handling and packaging industries.
The simplest continuous belt conveyor is shown below, also belt with the addition of flights would seem to have merit, particularly when the conveyor is inclined.
There are different types of such conveyor belts, listed below:
Segmented Conveyors:
The segmented straps can be designed something like a tread, rigid and segmented. where each piece is connected to the next one by a pin. Flights can be attached to a specific segment to properly space the parts during the transfer, and these flights can be custom moulded when better performance is needed.
Some flexible segmented belts can move along conveyor frames configured to move upwards, downwards, and to the right and left.
Air conveyor:
The handling requirements may dictate very delicate motions, one could use a conveyor based on air jets. Designed something like an air hockey table found in many arcades, the product is manipulated by air jets having a specific directional orientation.
Timing screw:
The output of a synchronization screw can be directly to a conveyor with flight, a pallet, or any other device that keeps the product properly spaced while processing. Each time screw is made to measure from your CAD drawing of the piece or of several pieces samples.
Star Wheels:
An alternative device to the time screw is a star wheel. Most star wheels are custom designed for a piece or container with a specific shape, but as the movement of the star wheel is in one plane (while the synchronization screw has a three-dimensional sweep volume challenge), its design is simpler.
Star wheels can be used to directly feed a part into a process or to place into a pallet system or flighted conveyor. Many star wheels have contours to specifically orient a part for future processing as shown:
